Here’s a collection of highlights, selected totally subjectively, from the recent enterprise HPC news stream as reported at insideHPC.com.

Building a business model on Network.com

GridToday article is carrying an interesting article about data processing company Infosolve Technologies and their move from their own datacenters to Sun’s Network.com computers:

When it discovered the Sun Grid Compute utility, Infosolve knew it had found the highly scalable, high-performance solution for which it was looking — and at a cost, by company estimates, $150,000 less per year per server node than traditional hosting services, and $300,000 per year less than building and maintaining an in-house cluster solution.

What’s so interesting is that utilizing the utility model is the norm at Infosolve, which currently runs data matching jobs across the Sun Grid for every single customer, whereas software-as-a-service programs with many ISVs tend to be among the less-popular options.

Short overview of RPUs in HPC

ITBusinessEdge has a short article that summarizes the current landscape in reconfigurable processing unit (aka, FPGA) computing for HPC.

NVIDIA demos CUDA plug-in for MATLAB

HPCwire is reporting that NVIDIA has demonstrated that its CUDA GPU programming API can be coupled with high-level programming language MATLAB. The plug-in is also outfitted to allow users to write their own libraries. (More info on this HPC news item)

Laptop maker Lenovo builds Formula One supercomputer

Lenovo, which recently absorbed IBM’s Personal Computing Division, announced this week that they’ve built a supercomputer for the AT&T Williams Formula One racing team. The 8 TFLOPS machines has four times more capacity than their previous supercomputer and will be used for improving the aerodynamics of Williams racing vehicles. (More info and a pic)

Intel’s Extreme processor

Intel announced its Core 2 Extreme processors this week, in desktop and laptop versions. The laptop probably isn’t HPC; the desktop chip might be used in clusters, so here are some stats from the release:

For desktop PCs, Intel is announcing a robust set of new processors, including the flagship Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 quad-core processor. Clocked at 3.0 GHz with a new, faster 1333 MHz system bus speed, the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 will be welcomed by game developers looking to deliver new features and performance levels. Intel also announced new Intel Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors.

Interestingly, Intel is piggy-backing its HPC success onto this announcement

A year ago this month the company began introducing these innovative and energy-efficient products, and in that year Intel Core microarchitecture and its processors have achieved a number of milestones, including:

Securing nearly half (224) of the 500 top-ranked high-performance computers as measured by the recently announced Top 500 Supercomputers List (www.top500.org).